timekiller-s:

fiercebunny:

State Question 759 is to be on the ballot this November. I think banning Affirmative Action would be a big step backwards for this state, so I plan on voting no to the ban.

Here’s something I read while googling the matter:

State sen. Ralph Shortey (R), one of the measure’s sponsors, said that the measure shows that Oklahoma is “becoming more color-blind.”

“One of the big reasons we need it is Oklahoma is perceived nationwide, and it is not warranted, as a racially biased state,” he said. “We don’t need that.”

Wait, what? So, according to this dude, in order not to be perceived as more racist, we should get rid of equal opportunity programs?

This is the state senator quoted.

State Senator Shortey also once  introduced a bill proposing a ban on the use of human fetuses in food. Which is not actually a thing.  So as far as I can tell, I probably can’t go wrong in voting against whatever this guy is for.

source

1. The “no fetuses in our food” bill from the last legislative session was derived, if memory serves from an interview I can’t find anymore, from information Shortey got off a radical right “Christian” anti-choice website. That should tell you everything about Ralph Shortey right there. He’s a mouthpiece for radicalised “Christian” activists that seek to throw out, at every level of governance, secular law and place instead a theocratic government (Christian Taliban, if you will) that punishes women, people of colour, and LGBTQ Oklahomans. He is not someone to be held up as an example of any kind of values, especially since it’s radical right-wingers like him that believe they and they alone hold a monopoly on “values” and all others be damned.

2. Oklahoma’s history of racial violence (aside from the U.S. Army’s general programme of genocide against Native Americans) includes one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history that STILL isn’t in textbooks enough: The 1921 conflagration that levelled Tulsa’s Greenwood district, which had been known as the “Black Wall Street.” Also, the KKK was active in Oklahoma particularly during the 1920s, especially after the influence of Socialists that was prevalent in the ‘teens began to wane in the years immediately following World War I. Oklahoma was not immune from lynchings and other incidents of the like, primarily before 1930, around which time activists began to publicly call out the practise in order to shame Oklahoma officials.

One of the links above is to a film aired on OETA about the Klan in Oklahoma that examines history in the early 20th Century as well as in modern times.

Later in the 20th Century, Clara Luper led Oklahomans in nonviolent civil actions against segregation in public places. A very good friend of mine is someone who marched with Luper when he was a teenager, and remembers being shot at on one such march.

I am not trying to lecture the original poster: I agree that SQ 759 should not pass. But it just takes one thing like this to get me going about how far-right elements have trashed Oklahoma in the last few years. And Oklahoma is getting redder and redder and not just the soil.

It certainly doesn’t help Oklahoma’s image that Gov. Mary Fallin disbanded the State Human Rights Commission and folded its duties into the State Attorney General’s Office as well.